Over the last 7 years I have had the pleasure and good company of several hundred wonderful folk on my spoon and bowl carving courses. I know many of you read the blog. There is a new website which I very much like set up by Kate Dew-Martin, it gives a range of craft courses available in the UK and…
Today I was in London meeting with Skills Minister John Hayes and the BIS craft skills advisory board. One of the things discussed was the NIACE craft toolkit. We helped publicise the call for input to this document a while ago and it’s good to see the finished website with a wealth of information. Perhaps one of the more interesting…
I started carving spoons 21 years ago inspired by Wille Sundqvists book “Swedish Carving Technique” back then there were no spoon carving courses the UK green woodworking scene was all about making windsor chairs on pole lathes. I was totally inspired by Wille Sunqvist “Carved utensils and other objects are a joy to use and live with. They are the…
I was just coresponding with someone about traditional Scandinavian turned vessels and wanted to post a link to pictures of snibbskål online, I couldn’t find any so thought I would share some pics I took in museums in Sweden in 2003, turns out I remembered the spelling wrong and can now add links to lots of great pictures. Google translates…
When I was a kid vanilla meant cheap, bland sweet things without other “proper” flavours in. How wrong can you be? A few weeks ago in France I had the most exquisite culinary experience in the form of a creme brulee made in heaven, well it tasted like it was, pure ambrosia. Here is the original These are my first…
On my last spooncarving course one of the students was TV presenter and green woodworking enthusiast Adam Hart Davis. He has been greenwoodworking for many years and is particularly fond of spooncarving. I was inspired to hear that Adam carves spoons on the train. I travel to London fairly often and have been learning to knit but spooncarving on the…
These pots are made by a friend “Jim The Pot“. He throws more pots than any other potter I know and that repetition leads to great skill and a lovely feeling of freedom and life in the work. He is not known amongst the pottery world or craft world though because he doesn’t do craft fairs or potfests. Jim specialises…
Here are pics from bowl and spooncarving courses just finished. Rob Nicholson is a good greenwoodworker but this was his first go at carving bowls, he did a nice blog post showing all the stages here. Here are a couple of finished bowls and then it was on to spooncarving first cutting suitable raw material with a big Japanese pull…
It’s important to get the best wood for spoon carving. When starting out I recomend willow (Salix sp), poplar (Populus sp), alder (Alnus) and lime (Tilia sp) lime in the UK is basswood in the US. These are the softest of the hardwoods. These woods carve really easily when freshly cut or green and make excellent cooking and serving spoons.…
